Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

A Wall Street Journal article ('A Scientist's Final Quest Is to Find New Schizophrenia Drugs. Will He Live to See Them?' Nov. 26, 2024) aroused several thoughts - Schizophrenia is vastly misdiagnosed particularly amongst those with substance abuse problems. Knowledge of child psychological development and developmental psychopathology is gravely lacking among professionals. Psychotropic drugs produce severe side effects, which are termed "improvement," and can be hard to stop. Closing of the state psychiatric hospitals, which despite their inadequacies were safe, had its promised savings go into state general coffers and not the out-patient services promised. Another disastrous element is the FDA's belief and wasted billions in drug treatments, worthless genetic research, and electrical gadgets for basically psychological disturbances. The genesis of schizophrenia in terms of faulty early life ego development has been understood for decades--by those who want to know!

1. Schizophrenia is greatly misdiagnosed particularly when substance abuse is present. 2. The benefits of psychotropic drugs tend to be exaggerated and their side-effects downplayed. A 1970s extensive study found the lowest rate of recidivism for severely disturbed hospitalized patients being when no medication was given, the next best result when medication was prescribed only during hospitalization, and the poorest outcome being when patients were told they need take medication after discharge (by believers of the "chemical imbalance" myth). 3. Explaining psychodynamics to patients can have a powerful healing effect as that paranoia is simply being overly watchful. Simple organization incompetence is often misinterpreted as conspiracy. As an aside, long ago the Silicon Valley guru, Andrew Grove, then head of Intel, wrote a famed book, Only The Paranoid Survive. 4. Information from mental health professionals varies in validity depending on their training, talent, and experience with some being worthless or even harmful. Still, people don't go to clinicians for advice, they almost always knowing what they want but being unable to achieve it and with which they need help. 5. Suicide reflects complex motive deriving from long term unhappiness exacerbated by recent stress, it often involving drug or alcohol use since there is a powerful biological imperative to live.

The crippling behaviors termed schizophrenia arise in infancy and toddlerhood when the child's capacity to distinguish themself from the surrounding world fails to develop normally because of faulty interaction with their mothering figure, who can be the father or another continually involved person. Thus basic perceptual abilities ("sense of self" or who one is; ability to distinguish reality from fantasy; ability to modulate mood) are deficient, causing later problems in the social, education, and vocation spheres of life. Treatment, which is not simple or brief, consists of providing the supportive interpersonal experience which enables re-negotiation of the early differentiation failure, during which ego capacities are strengthened. Drugs cannot accomplish this; only humans can.